It is a goal of current optical inspection tools to achieve high resolution and high throughput in order to provide the efficiency, reliability and accuracy demanded in semiconductor manufacturing process.
Inspection tools are required to detect and classify thousands of miniscule defects of interest (DOI) on the surface of an object (typically a semiconductor wafer) with high throughput and to indicate if the suspected DOIs are “killer” defects that will probably cause yield loss or nuisance that should be ignored.
Current inspection tools use dozens of configuration parameters that need to be calibrated and fine-tuned for achieving optimal inspection performance where the optimal sets of configuration parameters may depend on the inspected object and the types of DOIs per semiconductor wafer and/or photomask layer.
Accordingly, there is an unmet need to provide an automatic optimization heuristic that will enable configuring inspection tools. Furthermore, there is an unmet need to provide an automatic optimization heuristic that will enable providing a recipe that includes multiple sets of configuration parameters, fine-tuned for detection and classifications of different types of DOIs per semiconductor wafers and/or photomask layer.